Archive for the ‘Weather deterioration’ Category

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1st commercial ship sails through Northwest Passage

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

– Humanity has attempted to traverse across the top of Canada and Alaska via the Northwest Passage for hundreds of years and many men lost their lives in the attempts until is was first successfully done in 1906.   The ice has always made it nearly impossible – until Global Climate Change.  

– Folks down in the more temperate climes may think Global Climate Change is just a rumor.   But, up in the far north, it is anything but.   And it’ll be coming to your neighborhood soon as well.

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The Canadian Coast Guard has confirmed that in a major first, a commercial ship travelled through the Northwest Passage this fall to deliver supplies to communities in western Nunavut.

The MV Camilla Desgagnés, owned by Desgagnés Transarctik Inc., transported cargo from Montreal to the hamlets of Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk, Gjoa Haven and Taloyoak in September.

“We did have a commercial cargo vessel that did the first scheduled run from Montreal, up through the eastern Arctic, through the Northwest Passage to deliver cargo to communities in the west,” Brian LeBlanc of the Canadian Coast Guard told CBC News.

“That was the first — that I’m aware of anyway — commercial cargo delivery from the east through the Northwest Passage.”

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Rising Ocean Levels, The Perfect Storm, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

One Shot Left

Friday, November 28th, 2008

The latest science suggests that preventing runaway climate change means total decarbonisation.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 25th November 2008

George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America’s wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3000(1).

His backers – among them the nastiest pollutocrats in America – are calling in their favours. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble.

If it is now too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must carry much of the blame. His wilful trashing of the Middle Climate – the interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilisation to flourish – makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of his crimes against humanity. Bush has waged his war on science with the same obtuse determination with which he has waged his war on terror.

Is it too late? To say so is to make it true. To suggest that there is nothing that can now be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon. A new summary of the science published since last year’s Intergovernmental Panel report suggests that – almost a century ahead of schedule – the critical climate processes might have begun(2).

Just a year ago the Intergovernmental Panel warned that the Arctic’s “late-summer sea ice is projected to disappear almost completely towards the end of the 21st century … in some models.”(3) But, as the new report by the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC) shows, climate scientists are now predicting the end of late-summer sea ice within three to seven years. The trajectory of current melting plummets through the graphs like a meteorite falling to earth.

More… ➡

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1953 Popular Mechanics: Growing Blanket of Carbon Dioxide Raises Earth’s Temperature

Friday, November 21st, 2008

The Wayback Machine– First, it was looking back to the 1992 World Scientist’s Warning to Humanity.  

– Then, it was turning the calender pages back to 1979 and a meeting held at Woods Hole at which a paper entitled, “The Carbon Dioxide Problem: Implications for Policy in the Management of Energy and Other Resources“.

– Now, we’ll turn the dial on the ‘Wayback Machine‘ all the way back to 1953 and an article in the Popular Mechanics Magazine of the day.

– Truly, this information has been around for awhile.

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– To Climate Progress and the 1953 article… ➡

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A 1979 Climate Warning

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

– A while ago, I wrote a piece about the World Scientists Warning to Humanity 1992.   Now, DotEarth has come up with a similar warning dating back to 1979 which I’ve copied and linked to, below.

– And for those of you who can date your music impressions way back to the 1960’s, how about “Spirit – Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus – Nature’s Way“.   Even back then, I could hear what they were saying:  “It’s nature’s way of telling you; dying trees.”

– It’s not like the writing about the environment hasn’t been on the wall for those who were looking.

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The Cassandra Files: A 1979 Climate Warning

Few things are sadder than looking back and contemplating “what might have been.” It’s certainly not the kind of thing most people want to do at a birthday party.

But that was what happened on Oct. 24 when the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole, Mass., marked the 80th birthday of its founder, the biologist and ecologist George Woodwell, with a symposium on “Ecology and the Public Good.”

One participant, James Gustave Speth, passed out copies of a report he received in July 1979, when he was chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Its title was “The Carbon Dioxide Problem: Implications for Policy in the Management of Energy and Other Resources.” Its lead author was Dr. Woodwell, then the director of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory. His coauthors were Gordon J. MacDonald, Roger Revelle and Charles D. Keeling. All were eminent; Dr. Keeling was the first to chart increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — a rise known today as the Keeling curve. (Click here to download a PDF of the report.)

The report starts off with a blunt warning: “Man is setting in motion a series of events that seem certain to cause a significant warming of world climates over the next decades unless mitigating steps are taken immediately.” It adds, “ Enlightened policies in the management of fossil fuels and forests can delay or avoid these changes, but the time for implementing the policies is fast passing.”

In a forward he wrote for the reprinted report, Mr. Speth, now the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science, tells how the group of scientists prepared it for the White House, and how the Carter administration asked the National Academy of Sciences for guidance on its grim conclusions. While factors like the possible climate buffering influence of the oceans are imperfectly understood, the academy panel said, “if carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”

More… ➡

– Thanks to Dot Earth

– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com :arrow: as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

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Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Food Shortages, Pollution, The Perfect Storm, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Big Coal Campaigning to Keep Its Industry on Candidates’ Minds

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

– What no one seems to talk about much as they all extol the virtues of ‘clean coal’ is that there is not one functional full scale clean coal facility on the planet.  See: ➡  

– It’s all small ‘proof-of-concept’ studies.   And, every time  a clean coal facility was going to be built, thus far, the plans have been scrapped at the 11th hours because of costs.  

– And yet, and yet, the discussion of its virtues goes on and on about how it is going to be a major piece as we plan the future.  What dreams and bullshit we are being fed.

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Big Coal is paying close attention to what the presidential candidates are saying about keeping coal part of the U.S. energy mix.

Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, unlike President George W. Bush, support setting economy-wide caps on industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. That is a potential problem for the nation’s coal-fired power plants, which produce half the U.S. electricity supply — but also are the country’s leading source in recent years of emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, according to a report last month by the Government Accountability Office.

But as Election Day nears, both candidates are competing over who will do more to support clean-coal initiatives. For that, some credit belongs to Stephen Miller.

Mr. Miller, 55 years old, is president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a Virginia group funded by the country’s major coal-burning utilities, coal producers and railroads that haul coal. Over the past year, his organization has spent nearly $40 million on television and radio spots and other outreach efforts to bolster public support for coal, and to reinforce fears that limits on its use will raise living costs.

Mr. Miller’s group has been a fixture at presidential campaign events. At the Democratic and Republican conventions, the coalition spent a total of $1.7 million on advertising and street teams of workers who handed out water bottles, hats and literature about coal’s importance to the U.S. economy.

More… ➡

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Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Pollution, The Perfect Storm, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Bags packed for doomsday

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

– I’ve been on for sometime about New Zealand, as any long term reader of this Blog knows.   Indeed, my wife and I have secured resident visas for NZ as a sort of insurance policy.  

– This means that we now have the permanent right to live there, if we want to for the rest of our lives.  And, we may well do so when we’re ready to retire. 

– If the world begins to crumble as a result of the numerous threats that I an others have detailed, then moving there will certainly look like a good move.

– We’re not the only folks to think so.   I came across a reference to the article, below, on a friend’s Blog and I found it interesting reading, indeed.

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Is the end really, finally nigh? And if it is, what are you going to do about it? John McCrone meets some South Islanders who are getting ready for the end of the world as we know it.

The ‘twin tsunamis’ of global warming and peak oil could spell TEOTWAWKI – the end of the world as we know it – and already, quietly, some people are getting prepared because they believe we are talking years rather than decades.

Helen, a petite 42-year-old Nelson housewife, is racing to build her own personal TEOTWAWKI lifeboat.

Earlier this year, she and her American husband cashed-up  to buy a 21ha farm in a remote, easily defensible, river valley backing onto the Arthur Range, north-west of Nelson.

The site ticks the right boxes. Way above sea level. Its own spring and stream. Enough winter sun. A good mix of growing areas. A sprinkling of neighbouring farms strung along the valley’s winding dirt-track road.

The digger was to arrive this week to carve out the platform for an adobe eco-house. A turbine in the stream will generate power. A composting toilet will deal with sewage.

Then there is the stuff that could really get her labelled as a crank (and why she would prefer to remain relatively anonymous, at least until she is completely set up). Back at her rented house in Nelson, Helen shows the growing collection of horse-drawn ploughs, wheat grinders, treadle sewing machines and other rusting relics of the pre-carbon era, she believes she will need the day the petrol pumps finally run dry.  here is the library of yellowing books from colonial times, telling how to make your own soap, spin candlewicks, care for clydesdale horses.

More… ➡

– research thanks to Brian C.

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Food Shortages, Fundamentalism, New Zealand, Peak Oil, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

The methane time bomb

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

Arctic scientists discover new global warming threat as melting permafrost releases millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia’s northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a “lid” to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

More… ➡

– None of this is new.  But, it is getting closer.

– See: ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, and ➡

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Conflict fear over Arctic borders

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

– Not the first time I’ve written on this and I doubt it will be the last.

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A senior US Coast Guard commander has warned of the risk of conflict in the Arctic, unless disputes over international borders are resolved.

Speaking to the BBC during an Arctic patrol flight, Rear Adm Gene Brooks, in charge of the Coast Guard’s vast Alaska region, appealed for a diplomatic deal.

“The potential is there with undetermined boundaries and great wealth for conflict, or competition.

“There’s always a risk of conflict,” Adm Brookes said.

He added that this was especially the case “where you do not have established, delineated, agreed-upon borders”.

Russia is staking the largest claim to the Arctic, after planting a flag at the North Pole last summer, but Denmark, Norway, Canada and the United States are all involved in border disputes as well.

The admiral’s warning comes as the Arctic sea-ice has, for a second year running, retreated far more dramatically than the long-term average. The latest satellite analysis shows this year’s melt closely following last year’s record thaw.

More… ➡

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Climate inaction ‘costing lives’

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Failure to take urgent action to curb climate change is effectively violating the human rights of people in the poorest nations, an aid charity warns.

A report by Oxfam International says emissions, primarily from developed countries, are exacerbating flooding, droughts and extreme weather events.

As a result, harvests are failing and people are losing their homes and access to water, the authors observe.

They say human rights need to be at the heart of global climate policies.

Oxfam will be submitting its report, called Climate Wrongs and Human Rights, to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Righting wrongs

“Climate change was first seen as a scientific problem, then an economic one,” explained report author Kate Raworth. “Now it is becoming a matter of international justice.

The global impacts of climate change meant that nations had to be held accountable for the consequences of their actions, Ms Raworth said.

“Litigation is seldom the best way to solve a dispute.

“That is why we need a strong UN deal in 2009 to cut emissions and support adaption,” she added, referring to next year’s key UN climate summit where a future global climate strategy is expected to be agreed.

“However, vulnerable countries do need options to protect themselves. Rich country polluters have been fully aware of their culpability for many years.”

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Human Rights, Immigration Stress, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

U.S. Southwest Drought Could Be Start of New Dust Bowl

Monday, April 9th, 2007

The unprecedented drought that has gripped the southwestern United States isn’t almost over, researchers say, it may have only just begun.

That’s the consensus of all but 1 of the 19 climate models used as the basis for this week’s upcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to a new analysis.

Richard Seager, a senior research scientist with the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, and co-authors report their findings today in the online advance version of the journal Science.

Based on the climate models, the U.S. Southwest and parts of northern Mexico could become as arid as the North American Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s, the study authors report.

“If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought [will] become the new climatology of the American Southwest,” the team writes.

More… ➡

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